(3) Versions of Puppy roughly 511 and earlier have a bug in Gparted that prevents swap space from being correctly created. Any attempt results in an unusable unoccupied partition with an "unknown filesystem". Why is this?

Maybe has to do with the version of Gparted that is in these earlier versions of Puppy and your hardware.

Good question for a separate topic.

To really dig down to the cause, the first thing is determine if you are following the proper procedure to make a swap partition. Not an insult to your ability, but first step in troubleshooting a problem is start at a known point and work out from there.

Quote:

Any attempt results in an unusable unoccupied partition with an "unknown filesystem

This statement tells me you have tried to do it, but does not tell me what steps you did and what happens at each step in the process. These are the clues to the answer.

- Delete any existing partitions
- Select most of the drive (most = minus whatever I want for swap) as ext3
- Select a small part (256-1024mb) as linux-swap
- Click the RUN icon and let gparted do its thing

So for this, I had 3820mb to play with. Delete current partition(s), set a 3436mb ext3 partition, and a 384mb linux-swap partition. Then I click RUN.

It removes the old partition(s) just fine, and sticks in the new ext3 partition quite easily, but when it comes time to make the linux-swap partition, it errors out -- IIRC I looked at the log once and Puppy was trying to mount the swap as it was being made -- I'll have to check that again and make certain what it says. All I know for sure right now is that the last step in the process, where it actually makes the partition there and useful, that's where it mucked up.

I'll also note that it can't seem to make the swap turn off. Yeah, there's swapoff -- in and out of gparted -- but it doesn't work at all. IIRC I got it to work by opening a terminal and typing swapoff /dev/sda2 but I could be wrong about that._________________

Just something to try to see if it has an affect.
When using Gparted perform each procedure as a separate operation.
Do not do as a combo process.
At completion of each, look for desired result. I have seen Gparted mess up if you give it combination process. I know it is suppose to handle multiple processes, but a possible cause of problem to eliminate.

Have you tried with a newer version of Gparted than the one that comes with Puppy?_________________I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem.
When I was a kid I wanted to be older.... This is not what I expected

Actually a Gparted live CD might just solve your problem. Puppy really requires more than 128 MB of RAM without swap. A Gparted live CD will run happily in much less RAM than that. It's a catch-22: how can Puppy use your swap partition while Gparted in Puppy is messing with the swap partition? Or would that be a chicken-egg problem?

Actually a Gparted live CD might just solve your problem. Puppy really requires more than 128 MB of RAM without swap. A Gparted live CD will run happily in much less RAM than that. It's a catch-22: how can Puppy use your swap partition while Gparted in Puppy is messing with the swap partition? Or would that be a chicken-egg problem?

I just checked the "Gparted --About" page at SourceForge and found this:

Quote:

Requirements

GParted can be used on x86 and x86-64 based computers running Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X by booting from media containing GParted Live. A minimum of 128 MB of RAM is needed to use all of the features of the GParted application.

For the record, I have been using Gparted live version 0.72 for the past three years on a variety of computers and have not had any problems yet... In my opinion, it's the way to go...

Monsie_________________My username is pronounced: "mun-see". Derived from my surname, it was my nickname throughout high school.

I do usually use a LiveCD when the internal Puppy version falls down on the job. Trouble is, mine is missing I'll download a replacement later.

My concern was more "OK, what if there's an update to gparted that fixes this bug?", AND "what if it's not gparted that's causing the problem, but Puppy itself?"

I'm running basic troubleshooting here. Either gparted is falling down on the job, or Puppy is mucking it up, and I'm trying to figure out which is the issue. If a replacement (newer) gparted pet is installed and the problem goes away, that was the problem. If it doesn't... Puppy gotta problem in its history._________________

OK, open rxvt for the 'hard way'. Cmd swapoff -a does not error but pmconky shows no change -- so it didn't work but it didn't error.

Take II. Cmd swapoff /dev/sda2 *does* work. pmconky eventually shows change, as does refreshing the display in gparted.

Now to re-partition the swap partiton as... swap. Science!

Right-click on /dev/sda2 (linux-swap, 383.00mb), select format to->linux-swap. Then punch Apply, and click through the worthless "are you sure" dialog.

Errors out as expected. calibrate /dev/sda2 worked. set partition type on /dev/sda2 worked. create new linux-swap file system failed -- instantly. The command that apparently did not work is mkswap -L "" /dev/sda2. This time I'll save the log, and then open it to see what's going on. Of note, the filesystem on /dev/sda2 is now "unknown" and there is a yellow exclamation triangle next to it.

gparted saves its logs as *.htm files -- hmm, have to open with geany and wade through the tags. Unfortunately, there's nothing there except what it popped up on the screen -- and therefore we have a mystery still. Of note, it does mention that the libparted version is 1.8.8.

OK, let's have some fun.

Any command more specific than mkswap /dev/sda2 (i.e. specifying options) errors out. No error is given, but the usage info is displayed, indicating a problem occurred. That exact command does work.

Cmd swapon displays usage information. swapon -a does not error out but does not work, as indicated in both pmconky and gparted. swapon /dev/sda2 does work.

...so I would hazard that the issue is not gparted itself, but mkswap, which appears to be part of busybox. This tends to indicate that the version of busybox used with older-kernel (Wary 511 and earlier) Puppies is somewhat defective._________________

My goal is to make this relic practical if it is at all possible, or determining by exhaustive experimentation that such is NOT possible.

"Practical" is defined as "light web, word processing, and email" i.e. 90%+ of what the average PC user with a MUCH better machine generally does. I doubt I'll be able to run YouTube videos at even base (240p) quality, but it should handle nearly everything else.

BTW, I'm something of a... well, the term is "retrocomputing enthusiast". I spent most of my last semester in college (3yrs ago) programming a Commodore64 in assembly code (basically binary electrical impulses represented as hexadecimal digits on the screen) -- I thought that was fun, too.

Cute *.gif, BTW.

Er... weren't you going to send me a PM at some point? _________________

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